The forbidding sugar of hot desert sandand hallucinations of mushroom cloudslinger in a city where you can still get piewith a fried egg on top, where you might catcha glimpse of UFO dazzle. Even the lampposts bloominto alien heads. Barbed wire might keep out enemiesof the American dream, where the tiny famous lizard’s legscling to sad, solid rock. On the Trinity site, that sandturned to green glass. The scientists were unsureabout igniting the whole earth’s atmosphere, neverthelessthe violet light demanded goggles. Shadows of ranch houses,their neat boxes burned deep into the ground.

—

Jeannine Hall Gailey is Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of Becoming the Villainess and She Returns to the Floating World. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches part-time at National University’s MFA program and volunteers for Crab Creek Review.

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Published by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson

Lisa M. Hase-Jackson, MA, MFA, is a Writing Coach and Teacher. She is the editor of Zingara Poetry Review and 200 New Mexico Poems. She has developed and facilitated poetry writing workshops and circles all over the world and her poetry has appeared in such literary magazines as Inscape, Susquehanna Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Subscribe, Blue Ships, Kansas City Voices, and Sugar Mule.
View all posts by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson